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Forum Discussion
Former Member
3 years agoUpdate about Autofill improvements in Beta
Hey folks,
We’ve worked hard over the last three months to improve the reliability of Autofill in complex situations, such as when you have multiple items for the same website or want certain items...
esquared
3 years agoSuper Contributor
Followup and comments on current behavior (using macOS desktop beta 8.10.0 and Firefox plugin beta 2.6.1).
I'm not sure what the expected behavior is currently, but neither the desktop beta specification "only fill on this exact domain" nor the (apparently on-the-way-out) "Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser plug-in seem to have any affect on what entries are offered or allowed for a given website. That is:
- I can still select and fill any 1Password entry regardless of the "Autofill Behavior" setting of "only fill..." or "never fill..." options.
- The options "only" or "never" also seem to have no affect on what options are suggested, nor the order of the suggestions.
- The "Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser extension setting seems to do nothing, though it may now be a meaningless option, with the underlying behavior disabled.
- Furthermore, it has never been apparent to me that the same "improve suggestions" feature did anything useful in the context of multiple items with matching (second-level) domain names - that is, if a website matches
*.example.com
, it will be offered. That's unfortunately not very helpful when one has many sets of credentials for many sub-domains; e.g.only-this.example.com
.
I'm not sure if there is documented intended behavior, but as I noted in a previous comment, the referenced webpage about "autofill behavior" is currently a 404. Knowing what the current or future expected behavior would give us all a common starting point to discuss. Any chance someone from 1P/AB can share that?
The fundamental use case is someone (like me and my whole company) who work with many systems that have similar or exact domain matches. That is, it's only the full hostname that really matters most of the time. If I have foo.example.com
, I'm (almost) never going to want that to fill on bar.example.com
. Moreover, it's rarely helpful to even suggest anything else from the entire domain example.com
when there is an exact match for the full hostname (and possibly port) of a given URL for a given 1P entry.
So, this is are first cut at the critical requirements for a suitable implementation of autofill suggestion ordering:
- URL matches also designated "only fill on this exact domain"
- exact domain matches, including ports and paths
- exact domain matches, excluding ports and paths
- closest match considering matching sub-domains as more relevant (e.g. if filling on host.example.com
, suggest host.example.com
before example.com
, and both before any other.example.com
)
- closest match, using something like Levenshtein distance, w/ and w/out port or path components.
- favorited entries, matching base domain
- everything else, possibly after a visual break and perhaps a heading like "possible alternatives"
- Anything marked as "never fill" should never even be suggested.
As a bonus, if there was some way to specify regular expressions or GLOB-style matching (e.g. *.sub.domain.com
or foo[0-9]*.example.com
) to match multiple allowed sub-domains or hosts.
With that, the suggested ordering will more closely match what people are trying to do, which is the whole point of anything that is trying to guess (suggest) what the user is trying to do (aka. intent recognition).
I hope that is useful, and really hope that it somewhat matches what the 1P team is working towards. I'm happy to iterate on the requirements if someone wants more input from someone who has 1000s (yes 1000s) of entries and dozens or 100s of entries that match and are suggested currently.